How to sell without freaking yourself out :)

Last week you learned the first thing to do before selling someone is create a “relatedness” with them – i.e. establish a real concern for how they feel and what they need. You MUST have this before you dive in – skip at your peril.

Once you do that, drop your agenda and speak directly as you would to people you love. Honestly, I can’t think of a better way to sell that’s sustainable, fun, and fulfilling. There’s lots of ways to sell fast and shitty, but we’re not up to that, are we folks.

Today I’ll cover 3 subtle points of sales that give YOU confidence AND leave them connected and inspired:

1.Don’t try to prove yourself. What happens when you do this is you try to be smart and have all the answers. You end up looking and feeling like you’re striving and your energy gets weird. Guess what: they can feel it too.

When you believe you have all possible solutions, it doesn’t leave room for what THEY may bring to the table: fears, honesty, genuine need. You become hyper focused on the outcome, the conversation narrows, and the exact thing you don’t want to say, you say because you’re nervous. I’ve been here and it is painful. A more effective way to BE with them is listen and enter when you have a genuine solution or impulse to help solve part of their problem.

2. Like yourself first. This one I learned over time. I noticed the happier I felt about myself, the more people connected and said Yes. Contrast to when I felt shitty, but sold anyway, and left many conversations with No’s, feeling awful.

I feel like this is a Jedi secret and the amount of people, read: everyone, that skips this step is nuts. If you’re living a crappy life and don’t like yourself, START here before you sell. Tony Robbins talks about changing your emotional state first, before you can dive into action. I’d say this is especially true of sales because:

Because people don’t buy products. They buy energy. They buy stories. They buy YOU.

If you’re unhappy about your life, even the best sales tactics won’t help. YOU have to get to a place of high self-worth where you enjoy who you are, then sell. This is a subtle, higher-level sales skill, so you’ll have to practice. But you *need* to grasp it fundamentally if you want to get better at sales.

3. It will always be awkward, because people are people. I don’t think I’ve been on one sales call where it didn’t get awkward at some point. Even opportunities that felt TAILOR-MADE for me and people who felt like brethren ;) and said Yes in 30 seconds, there was an awkward moment: Can I be myself? What can I *really* say? What will they think? These come up in every conversation but we don’t TALK ABOUT IT.

Look, we all have Stuff. Especially when people invest in themselves, raw stuff like money, self-esteem, family, and anxiety issues come up. It’s natural and happens ALL THE TIME. But if you’ve practiced meeting uncomfortable energy, working with weirdness and ACCEPTING it all, you’re automatically better than everyone else at sales because you know how to make it SAFE.

You can make them feel comfortable and safe, in spite of the awkwardness.

I don’t know why we’re all so afraid of being awkward anyway. I quite enjoy it and find people are more real and authentic when they’re awkward. Maybe that’s because I’ve been awkward my whole life! People are awkward. So don’t worry. Just practice so you’re ready for your next conversation.